Yoko Ono (born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist who is also known for her work in performance art and filmmaking.[2] She performs in both English and Japanese. She was the second wife and widow of singer-songwriter John Lennon of the Beatles.

As Lennon's widow, Ono works to preserve his legacy. She funded Strawberry Fields in Manhattan's Central Park, the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland, and the John Lennon Museum in Saitama, Japan (which closed in 2010). She has made significant philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace, Philippine and Japan disaster relief, and other causes. In 2012 Yoko Ono received the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Human Rights Award endowed by Alexandra Hildebrandt. The award is given annually in recognition of extraordinary, non-violent commitment to human rights. Ono continues her social activism, inaugurating a biennial $50,000 LennonOno Grant for Peace in 2002 and co-founding the group Artists Against Fracking in 2012. She has a daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, from her marriage to Anthony Cox and a son, Sean Taro Ono Lennon, from her marriage to Lennon. She collaborates musically with Sean Lennon.

Two weeks before Yoko's birth, Eisuke was transferred to San Francisco by his employer, the Yokohama Specie Bank.[6] The rest of the family followed soon after, with Yoko meeting Eisuke when she was two.[7] Her younger brother Keisuke was born in December 1936. Yoko was enrolled in piano lessons from the age of 4.[8] In 1937, the family was transferred back to Japan and Ono enrolled at Tokyo's Gakushuin (also known as the Peers School), one of the most exclusive schools in Japan.[6]

In 1940, the family moved to New York City. The next year, Eisuke was transferred from New York City to Hanoi, and the family returned to Japan. Ono was enrolled in Keimei Gakuen, an exclusive Christian primary school run by the Mitsui family. She remained in Tokyo through the great fire-bombing of March 9, 1945, during which she was sheltered with other family members in a special bunker in the Azabu district of Tokyo, far from the heavy bombing. Ono later went to the Karuizawa mountain resort with members of her family.[6]

Ono and her family were forced to beg for food while pulling their belongings in a wheelbarrow. It was during this period in her life, Ono says, that she developed her "aggressive" attitude and understanding of "outsider" status when children taunted her and Keisuke, who were once well-to-do. Other stories have her mother bringing a large number of goods with them to the countryside, where they bartered them for food. In one anecdote, her mother bartered a German-made sewing machine for 60 kilograms (130 lb) of rice to feed the family.[6] Her father remained in the city, unknown to the family, who believed he was in a prisoner of war camp in China. Ono told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now on October 16, 2007, that "He was in French Indochina, which is Vietnam actually.... in Saigon. He was in a concentration camp."[9]

By April 1946, Gakushuin was reopened and Ono re-enrolled. The school, located near the Tokyo Imperial Palace, had not been damaged by the war, and Ono found herself a classmate of Prince Akihito, the future emperor of Japan.[3][4] She graduated in 1951 and was accepted into the philosophy program of Gakushuin University as the first woman to enter the department. However, she left the school after two semesters.[6]

Ono's family moved to Scarsdale, New York (an affluent town 25 miles north of mid-town Manhattan) without her after the war. When she later rejoined her family in the U.S., she enrolled nearby in Sarah Lawrence College. While her parents approved of her college choice, Ono said they disapproved of her lifestyle and chastised her for befriending people they felt were beneath her. In spite of her parents' disapproval, Ono loved meeting artists, poets, and others who represented the bohemian lifestyle to which she aspired. Visiting galleries and art happenings in the city whetted her desire to display her own artistic endeavors publicly. American avant-garde artist, composer, and musician La Monte Young, her first important contact in the New York art world, helped Ono start her career by using her Chambers Street loft in Tribeca as a performance space. After Ono set a painting on fire at one performance, her mentor John Cage advised her to treat the paper with flame retardant.[4]

In 1956, Ono left college to elope with Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi,[4][10] a star in Tokyo's experimental community.[11] After living apart for several years, they filed for divorce in 1962. Ono returned home to live with her parents and, suffering from clinical depression, was briefly placed in a mental institution.[3][12] Later that year, on November 28, 1962, Ono married Anthony Cox, an American jazz musician, film producer, and art promoter, who was instrumental in securing her release from the Japanese mental institution.[4] However, because Ono had neglected to finalize her divorce from Ichiyanagi, her second marriage was annulled on March 1, 1963. After finalizing the divorce, Cox and Ono married again on June 6, 1963. She gave birth to their daughter Kyoko Chan Cox two months later on August 8, 1963.[3]

The marriage quickly fell apart, but the Coxes stayed together for the sake of their joint careers. They performed at Tokyo's Sogetsu Hall, with Ono lying atop a piano played by John Cage. Soon, the couple returned to New York with Kyoko. In the early years of the marriage, Ono left most of Kyoko's parenting to Cox while she pursued her art full-time. Cox also managed her publicity. She and Cox divorced on February 2, 1969. However, in 1971, Cox disappeared with their then-eight-year-old daughter, in the midst of the custody battle. He won custody after claiming Ono was an "unfit mother" due to her drug use.[12] Ono's ex-husband subsequently raised Kyoko under the name Ruth Holman in an organization known as the Church of the Living Word (or "the Walk").[13] Ono and her third husband John Lennon searched for Kyoko for years, to no avail. She first saw Kyoko again in 1998.[12]

Fluxus, a loose association of Dada-inspired avant-garde artists that developed in the early 1960s, was active in New York and Europe.[14] Ono visited London to meet artist and political activist Gustav Metzger's Destruction in Art Symposium in September 1966, as the only woman artist chosen to perform her own events and only one of two invited to speak.[15]

There are two versions of the story regarding how Lennon met Ono. According to the first account, on November 9, 1966 Lennon went to the Indica Gallery in London, where Ono was preparing her conceptual art exhibit, and they were introduced by gallery owner John Dunbar.[16] Lennon was initially unimpressed with the exhibits he saw, including a pricey bag of nails, but one piece had a ladder with a spyglass at the top. When he climbed the ladder, Lennon felt a little foolish, but he looked through the spyglass and saw the word "YES" which he said meant he didn't walk out, as it was positive, whereas most concept art he encountered was "anti" everything.[17]

Ono and Lennon in 1980

Lennon was also intrigued by Ono's Hammer a Nail. Viewers hammered a nail into a wooden board, creating the art piece. Although the exhibition had not yet opened, Lennon wanted to hammer a nail into the clean board, but Ono stopped him. Dunbar asked her, "Don't you know who this is? He's a millionaire! He might buy it." Ono supposedly had not heard of the Beatles, but relented on the condition that Lennon pay her five shillings, to which Lennon replied, "I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in."[17][18]

Paul McCartney told a second version of the first meeting of Ono and Lennon. In 1965, Ono was in London compiling original musical scores for a book entitled Notations'; John Cage was working on the book. McCartney declined to give her any of his own manuscripts, but suggested that Lennon might oblige. Lennon did, giving Ono the original handwritten lyrics to "The Word."[19]

In a 2002 interview, she said, "I was very attracted to him. It was a really strange situation."[20] The two began corresponding and, in September 1967, Lennon sponsored Ono's solo show at Lisson Gallery in London.[21] When Lennon's wife Cynthia asked for an explanation for Ono's telephoning their home, he told her that Ono was only trying to obtain money for her "avant-garde bullshit."[22] In early 1968, while the Beatles were making their famous visit to India, Lennon wrote "Julia" and included a reference to Ono: "Ocean child calls me", referring to the translation of Yoko's Japanese spelling.[5] In May 1968, while his wife was on holiday in Greece, Lennon invited Ono to visit. They spent the night recording what would become the Two Virgins album,[21] after which, he said, they "made love at dawn".[23] When Lennon's wife returned home, she found Ono wearing her bathrobe and drinking tea with Lennon who simply said, "Oh, hi."[24]

On September 24 and 25, 1968, Lennon wrote and recorded "Happiness Is a Warm Gun",[25] which contains sexual references to Ono. A few weeks after Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was granted, Ono became pregnant, but she suffered the miscarriage of a male child on November 21, 1968.[26][27]

During the last two years of the existence the Beatles, Lennon and Ono created and attended their own public protests against the Vietnam War. On March 20, 1969, they were married at the registry office in Gibraltar and spent their honeymoon in Amsterdam, campaigning with a week-long Bed-In for Peace. They planned another Bed-In in the US, but were denied entry to the country.[28] They held one instead at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance".[29][30] Lennon later stated his regrets about feeling "guilty enough to give McCartney credit as co-writer on my first independent single instead of giving it to Yoko, who had actually written it with me."[31] The famous couple often combined advocacy with performance art, such as in "bagism", first introduced during a Vienna press conference, where they satirised prejudice and stereotyping by wearing a bag over their entire bodies. Lennon detailed this period in the Beatles' song "The Ballad of John and Yoko".[32]

Lennon changed his name by deed poll on April 22, 1969, switching out Winston for Ono as a middle name. Although he used the name John Ono Lennon thereafter, official documents referred to him as John Winston Ono Lennon, since he was not permitted to revoke a name given at birth.[33] The couple settled at Tittenhurst Park at Sunninghill, Berkshire, in southeast England.[34] When Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a king-sized bed to be brought to the recording studio as he worked on the Beatles' last recorded album, Abbey Road.[35]

Ono influenced Lennon to produce more "autobiographical" output and, after "The Ballad of John and Yoko", they decided it would be better to form their own band rather than put the material out under the Beatles name.[38] In 1969, the Plastic Ono Band's first album, Live Peace in Toronto 1969, was recorded during the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival. This first incarnation of the group also consisted of guitarist Eric Clapton, bass player Klaus Voormann, and drummer Alan White. The first half of their performance consisted of rock standards. During the second half, Ono took to the microphone and performed an avant-garde set along with the band, finishing with music that consisted mainly of feedback, while she screamed and sang.[39][40]

Ono released her first solo album, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, in 1970 as a companion piece to Lennon's better-known John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. The two albums also had companion covers: Ono's featured a photo of her leaning on Lennon, and Lennon's a photo of him leaning on Ono. Her album included raw, harsh vocals, which bore a similarity with sounds in nature (especially those made by animals) and free jazz techniques used by wind and brass players. Performers included Ornette Coleman, other renowned free jazz performers, and Ringo Starr. Some songs on the album consisted of wordless vocalizations, in a style that would influence Meredith Monk[41] and other musical artists who have used screams and vocal noise in lieu of words. The album reached No. 182 on the US charts.[42]

After the Beatles disbanded in 1970, Ono and Lennon lived together in London and then in New York—the latter to escape tabloid racism towards Ono.[49] Their relationship became strained because Lennon was facing the threat of deportation due to drug charges that had been filed against him in England, and also because of Ono's separation from her daughter. The couple separated in July 1973, with Ono pursuing her career and Lennon living between Los Angeles and New York with personal assistant May Pang; Ono had given her blessing to Lennon and Pang.[50][51]

By December 1974, Lennon and Pang considered buying a house together, and he refused to accept Ono's phone calls. The next month, Lennon agreed to meet Ono, who claimed to have found a cure for smoking. After the meeting, he failed to return home or call Pang. When Pang telephoned the next day, Ono told her that Lennon was unavailable, because he was exhausted after a hypnotherapy session. Two days later, Lennon reappeared at a joint dental appointment with Pang; he was stupefied and confused to such an extent that Pang believed he had been brainwashed. He told her that his separation from Ono was now over, though Ono would allow him to continue seeing her as his mistress.[52]

Ono and Lennon's son, Sean, was born on October 9, 1975, Lennon's 35th birthday. John did not help relations with his first son when he described Julian in 1980 as being part of the "ninety percent of the people on this planet [who resulted from an unplanned pregnancy]" and that "Sean is a planned child, and therein lies the difference." He said, "I don't love Julian any less as a child. He's still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn't have pills in those days."[53] The couple maintained a low profile for the next five years. Sean has followed in his parents' footsteps with a musical career, performing solo work, working with Ono, and forming a band, the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger.[54]

Lennon took a hiatus from music and became a househusband to care for Sean. He resumed his songwriting career shortly before his December 1980 murder, which Ono witnessed at close range. She has stated that the couple was thinking about going out to dinner after spending several hours in a recording studio, but were returning to their apartment instead, because Lennon wanted to see Sean before he was put to bed.[55] Following the murder, Ono went into complete seclusion for an extended period.[56]

Ono funded the construction and maintenance of the Strawberry Fields memorial in Manhattan's Central Park, directly across from the Dakota Apartments, which was the scene of the murder and remains Ono's residence to this day. It was officially dedicated on October 9, 1985, which would have been his 45th birthday. In 1990, Ono collaborated with music consultant Jeff Pollack to honor what would have been Lennon's 50th birthday with a worldwide broadcast of "Imagine". Over 1,000 stations in over 50 countries participated in the simultaneous broadcast. Ono felt the timing was perfect, considering the escalating conflicts in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Germany.[57]

In 2000, she founded the John Lennon Museum in Saitama, Saitama, Japan. In March 2002, she was present with Cherie Blair at the unveiling of a 7-foot statue of Lennon, to mark the renaming of Liverpool airport to Liverpool John Lennon Airport.[20] (Julian and Cynthia Lennon were present at the unveiling of the John Lennon Peace Monument next to ACC Liverpool in the same city eight years later.)[58] On October 9, 2007, she dedicated a new memorial called the Imagine Peace Tower, located on the island of Viðey, 1 km outside the Skarfabakki harbour in Reykjavík, Iceland. Each year, between October 9 and December 8, it projects a vertical beam of light high into the sky. In 2009, Ono created an exhibit called "John Lennon: The New York City Years" for the NYC Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex. The exhibit used music, photographs, and personal items to depict Lennon's life in New York, and a portion of the cost of each ticket was donated to Spirit Foundation, a charitable foundation set up by Lennon and Ono.[59]

Every time Lennon's assassin Mark David Chapman has a parole hearing – which occurs every two years – Ono has come out strongly against his release from prison. As the widow of the victim, her opinion has a strong influence on the parole board.

Ono is often associated with the Fluxus group, whose founder George Maciunas, her friend during the 1960s, admired and promoted her work enthusiastically, giving Ono her US show at his AG Gallery in 1961. Maciunas invited her formally join the Fluxus group, but she declined because she wanted to remain independent.[60] She did however, collaborate with him,[61]Charlotte Moorman, George Brecht, and the poet Jackson Mac Low, among others associated with the group.[62]

After Cage finished teaching at the New School in the summer of 1960, Ono was determined to rent a place to present her works along with the work of other avant-garde artists in the city. She eventually found a cheap loft in downtown Manhattan at 112 Chambers Street that she used as a studio and living space. Supporting herself through secretarial work and lessons in the traditional Japanese arts at the Japan Society, Ono allowed composer La Monte Young to organize concerts in the loft.[62] Both began organizing a series of events there from December 1960 through June 1961,[66] with people such as Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim attending,[68] and both Ono and Young claimed to have been the primary curator of these events,[69] with Ono claiming to have been eventually pushed into a subsidiary role by Young.[67] The Chambers Street series hosted some of Ono's earliest conceptual artwork, including Painting to Be Stepped On, which was a scrap of canvas on the floor that became a completed artwork upon the accrual of footprints. With that work, Ono suggested that a work of art no longer needed to be mounted on a wall and inaccessible. She showed this work and other instructional work again at Macunias's AG Gallery in July 1961.[68]

Yoko Ono is credited for the album cover art for Nirvana Symphony by Toshiro Mayazumi (Time Records, 1962).

Ono was a pioneer of conceptual art and performance art. A seminal performance work is Cut Piece, first performed in 1964 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. The piece consisted of Ono, dressed in her best suit, kneeling on a stage with a pair of scissors in front of her. She invited and then instructed audience members to join her on stage and cut pieces of her clothing off. Confronting issues of gender, class and cultural identity, Ono sat silently until the piece concluded at her discretion.[70] The piece was subsequently performed at New York's Carnegie Hall in 1965 and London's Africa Center in 1966. Of the piece, John Hendricks in the catalogue to Ono's Japan Society retrospective wrote: "[Cut Piece] unveils the interpersonal alienation that characterizes social relationships between subjects, dismantling the disinterested Kantian aesthetic model..... It demonstrates the reciprocity between artists, objects, and viewers and the responsibility beholders have to the reception and preservation of art."[70]

Other performers of the piece have included Charlotte Moorman and John Hendricks.[70] Ono reprised the piece in Paris in 2003, in the low post-9/11 period between the US and France, saying she hoped to show that this is "a time where we need to trust each other."[4] In 2013, the Canadian singer, Peaches reprised it at the multi-day Meltdown festival at the Southbank Centre in London, which Ono curated.[71]

Ono's small book titled Grapefruit is another seminal piece of conceptual art. First published in 1964, the book reads as a set of instructions through which the work of art is completed-either literally or in the imagination of the viewer participant. One example is "Hide and Seek Piece: Hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody forgets about you. Hide until everybody dies." Grapefruit has been published several times, most widely distributed by Simon & Schuster in 1971, who reprinted it again in 2000. David Bourdon (de), art critic for The Village Voice and Vogue, called Grapefruit "one of the monuments of conceptual art of the early 1960's." He noted that her conceptual approach was made more acceptable when white male artists like Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner came in and "did virtually the same things" she did, and that her take also has a poetic and lyrical side that sets it apart from the work of other conceptual artists.[72]

Ono would enact many of the book's scenarios as performance pieces throughout her career, which formed the basis for her art exhibitions, including the highly publicized retrospective exhibition, This Is Not Here in 1971 at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York,[73] that was nearly closed when it was besieged by excited Beatles fans, who broke several of the art pieces and flooded the toilets.[74] It was her last major exhibition until 1989's Yoko Ono: Objects, Films retrospective at the Whitney.[72]

Nearly fifty years later, in July 2013, she released a sequel to Grapefruit, another book of instructions, Acorn via OR Books.[75]

Ono was also an experimental filmmaker who made 16 short films between 1964 and 1972, gaining particular renown for a 1966 Fluxus film called simply No. 4, often referred to as Bottoms.[76][77] The five-and-a-half-minute film consists of a series of close-ups of human buttocks walking on a treadmill. The screen is divided into four almost equal sections by the elements of the gluteal cleft and the horizontal gluteal crease. The soundtrack consists of interviews with those who are being filmed, as well as those considering joining the project. In 1996, the watch manufacturing company Swatch produced a limited edition watch that commemorated this film.[78]

In March 2004, the ICA London, showed most of her films from this period in their exhibition The Rare Films of Yoko Ono.[77] She also acted in an obscure exploitation film in 1965, Satan's Bed.[76]

In 2015, Ono created the piece Arising in Venice, Italy. As part of the exhibition Personal Structures, organised by Global Art Affairs, the installation was on view from June 1 through November 24, 2013, at the European Cultural Centre's Palazzo Bembo.[87] In this feminist work of art, female silicon bodies were burnt in the Venetian lagoon, evoking the imagary of mythical phoenixes. When asked for the resemblance between the naming of her record Rising and this piece, Ono responded: "Rising was telling all people that it is time for us to rise and fight for our rights. But in the process of fighting together, women are still being treated separately in an inhuman way. It weakens the power of men and women all together. I hope Arising will wake up Women Power, and make us, men and women, heal together."[88]

In October 2016, Ono unveiled her first permanent art installation in the United States, which is located in Jackson Park, Chicago and promotes peace.[89] Ono was inspired during a visit to the Garden of the Phoenix in 2013 and feels a connection to the city of Chicago.[90]

In 1989, the Whitney Museum held a retrospective of her work, Yoko Ono: Objects, Films, marking Ono's reentry into the New York art world after a hiatus. At the suggestion of Ono's live-in companion at the time, interior decorator Sam Havadtoy, she recast her old pieces in bronze after some initial reluctance. "I realized that for something to move me so much that I would cry, there's something there. There seemed like a shimmering air in the 60s when I made these pieces, and now the air is bronzified. Now it's the 80s, and bronze is very 80s in a way - solidity, commodity, all of that. For someone who went through the 60s revolution, there has of course been an incredible change. . . . I call the pieces petrified bronze. That freedom, all the hope and wishes are in some ways petrified."[72]

Over a decade later, in 2001, Y E S YOKO ONO, a 40-year retrospective of Ono's work, received the International Association of Art Critics USA Award for Best Museum Show Originating in New York City, considered one of the highest accolades in the museum profession. YES refers to the title of a 1966 sculptural work by Yoko Ono, shown at Indica Gallery, London: viewers climb a ladder to read the word "yes", printed on a small canvas suspended from the ceiling.[98] The exhibition's curator Alexandra Munroe wrote that "John Lennon got it, on his first meeting with Yoko: when he climbed the ladder to peer at the framed paper on the ceiling, he encountered the tiny word YES. 'So it was positive. I felt relieved.'”[99] The exhibition traveled to 13 museums in the U.S., Canada, Japan, and Korea from 2000 through 2003.[100] In 2001, she also received an honorary Doctorate of Laws from Liverpool University and, in 2002, was presented with the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Bard College,[101] as well as the Skowhegan Medal for work in assorted media.[102] The next year, she was awarded the fifth MOCA Award to Distinguished Women in the Arts from the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.[103] In 2005, she received a lifetime achievement award from the Japan Society of New York, which had hosted Yes Yoko Ono[104] and where she had worked in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Ono studied piano from the age of 4 to 12 or 13. She attended kabuki performances with her mother, who was trained in shamisen, koto, otsuzumi, kotsuzumi, nagauta, and could read Japanese musical scores. At 14 Yoko took up vocal training in lieder-singing. At Sarah Lawrence, she studied poetry with Alastair Reid, English literature with Kathryn Mansell, and music composition with the Viennese-trained André Singer.[8] Of this time Ono has said that her heroes were the twelve-tone composersArnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. She said, "I was just fascinated with what they could do. I wrote some twelve-tone songs, then my music went into [an] area that my teacher felt was really a bit off track, and..... he said, 'Well, look, there are people who are doing things like what you do and they're called avant-garde.'" Singer introduced her to the work of Edgar Varèse, John Cage, and Henry Cowell. She left college and moved to New York in 1957, supporting herself through secretarial work and lessons in the traditional Japanese arts at the Japan Society.[66]

She met Cage through Ichiyanagi Toshi in Cage's legendary composition class at the New School for Social Research,[67] and in the summer of 1960, she found a cheap loft in downtown Manhattan at 112 Chambers Street and allowed composer La Monte Young to organize concerts in the loft with her,[62] with people like Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim attending.[68] Ono only presented work once during the series.[66] In 1961, years before meeting Lennon, Ono had her first major public performance in a concert at the 258-seat Carnegie Recital Hall (smaller than the "Main Hall"). This concert featured radical experimental music and performances. She had a second engagement at the Carnegie Recital Hall in 1965, in which she debuted Cut Piece.[112] She premiered The Fog Machine during her Concert of Music for the Mind at the Bluecoat Society of Arts in Liverpool, England in 1967.[113]

In early 1980, John Lennon heard Lene Lovich and the B-52's' "Rock Lobster" on vacation in Bermuda. The latter reminded him of Ono's musical sound and he took this as an indication that she had reached the mainstream[114] (the band in fact had been influenced by Ono).[115] In addition to her collaborations with experimental artists including John Cage and jazz legend Ornette Coleman, many other musicians, particularly those of the new wave movement, have paid tribute to Ono (both as an artist in her own right, and as a muse and iconic figure). For example, Elvis Costello recorded a version of Ono's song "Walking on Thin Ice",[116] the B-52's (who drew from her early recordings)[7] covered "Don't Worry, Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)" (shortening the title to "Don't Worry"), and Sonic Youth included a performance of Ono's early conceptual "Voice Piece for Soprano" on their experimental album SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century.[117]

On December 8, 1980, Lennon and Ono were in the studio working on Ono's song "Walking on Thin Ice". When they returned to The Dakota, their home in New York City, Lennon was shot dead by Mark David Chapman, a deranged fan who had been stalking Lennon for two months. "Walking on Thin Ice (For John)" was released as a single less than a month later, and became Ono's first chart success, peaking at No. 58 and gaining major underground airplay. In 1981, she released the album Season of Glass, which featured the striking cover photo of Lennon's bloody spectacles next to a half-filled glass of water, with a window overlooking Central Park in the background. This photograph sold at an auction in London in April 2002 for about $13,000. In the liner notes to Season of Glass, Ono explained that the album was not dedicated to Lennon because "he would have been offended—he was one of us." The album received highly favorable reviews[7] and reflected the public's mood after Lennon's assassination.[118][119]

In 1982, she released It's Alright. The cover featured Ono in her famous wrap-around sunglasses, looking towards the sun, while on the back the ghost of Lennon looks over her and their son. The album scored minor chart success[120] and airplay with the single "Never Say Goodbye".[121]

Ono's final album of the 1980s was Starpeace, a concept album that she intended as an antidote to Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defense system. On the cover, a warm, smiling Ono holds the Earth in the palm of her hand. Starpeace became Ono's most successful non-Lennon effort. The single "Hell in Paradise" was a hit, reaching No. 16 on the US dance charts and No. 26 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the video, directed by Zbigniew Rybczyński received major airplay on MTV and won "Most Innovative Video" at Billboard Music Video Awards in 1986.[128] In 1986, Ono set out on a goodwill world tour for Starpeace, primarily visiting Eastern European countries.[21]

Ono went on a musical hiatus until signing with Rykodisc in 1992 to release the comprehensive six-disc box set Onobox.[21] It included remastered highlights from all of Ono's solo albums, as well as unreleased material from the 1974 "lost weekend" sessions.[129] She also released a one-disc sampler of highlights from Onobox, simply titled Walking on Thin Ice.[130] That year, she sat down for an extensive interview with music journalist Mark Kemp for a cover story in the alternative music magazine Option. The story took a revisionist look at Ono's music for a new generation of fans more accepting of her role as a pioneer in the merger of pop and the avant-garde.[131]

In 1994, Ono produced her own off-Broadwaymusical entitled New York Rock, featuring Broadway renditions of her songs.[132] In 1995, she released Rising, a collaboration with her son Sean and his then-band, Ima. Rising spawned a world tour that traveled through Europe, Japan, and the United States. The following year, she collaborated with various alternative rock musicians for an EP entitled Rising Mixes.[133] Guest remixers of Rising material included Cibo Matto, Ween, Tricky, and Thurston Moore.[134] In 1997, Rykodisc reissued all her solo albums on CD, from Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band through Starpeace.[21] Ono and her engineer Rob Stevens personally remastered the audio, and various bonus tracks were added, including outtakes, demos, and live cuts.[135][136][137]

In April 2003, Ono's Walking on Thin Ice (Remixes) was rated number 1 on Billboard's Dance/Club Play chart, gaining Ono her first no. 1 hit. She returned to no. 1 on the same chart in November 2004 with "Everyman ... Everywoman ...", a reworking of her song "Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him", in January 2008, with "No No No", and in August 2008, with "Give Peace a Chance". In June 2009, at the age of 76, Ono scored her fifth no. 1 hit on the Dance/Club Play chart with "I'm Not Getting Enough".[7]

In April 2010, RCRD LBL made available free downloads of Junior Boys' mix of "I'm Not Getting Enough", a single originally released 10 years prior on Blueprint for a Sunrise.[148] That song and "Wouldnit (I'm a Star)", released September 14,[149] made it to Billboard's end of the year list of favorite Dance/Club songs at No. 23 and No. 50 respectively.[150][151] The next year, "Move on Fast" became her sixth consecutive number-one hit on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart and her eighth number-one hit overall.[152] In January 2012, a Ralphi Rosario mix of her 1995 song "Talking to the Universe" became her seventh consecutive No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart, and both songs charted again as favorites on Billboard's year-end lists for Dance/Club songs for 2011.[153] In 2013, She and her band released the LP Take Me to the Land of Hell which featured numerous guests including Yuka Honda, Cornelius, Hirotaka "Shimmy" Shimizu, mi-gu's Yuko Araki, Wilco's Nels Cline, tUnE-yArDs, Questlove, Lenny Kravitz, and Ad-Rock and Mike D of the Beastie Boys. Her online video for "Bad Dancer" released in November 2013, which featured some of these guests, was well-liked by the press.[154][155] By the end of the year she had become one of three artists with two songs in the Top 20 Dance/Club and had two consecutive number 1 hits on Billboard's Hot Dance Club Play Charts. On the strength of the singles "Hold Me" (Featuring Dave Audé) and "Walking on Thin Ice", the then-80-year-old beat Katy Perry, Robin Thicke, and her friend Lady Gaga.[139] In 2014, "Angel" was Ono's twelfth number one on the US Dance chart.[156]

In 2012, the album Yokokimthurston was released featuring a collaboration with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. Notable also as the first collaboration between Moore and Gordon after their divorce, it was characterized by AllMusic as "focused and risk-taking" and "above the best" of the couple's experimental music, with Ono's voice described as "one-of-a-kind."[163]

In 1997, together with the BMI Foundation, Yoko Ono established an annual music competition program for songwriters of contemporary musical genres, to honor John Lennon's memory and his large creative legacy.[164] Over $350,000 have been given through BMI Foundation's John Lennon Scholarships to talented young musicians in the United States, making it one of the most respected awards for emerging songwriters.

Ono was frequently criticized by the press and the public for many years. She was blamed for the breakup of the Beatles[165][84][166] and repeatedly criticized for her influence over Lennon and his music.[3] Her experimental art was also not popularly accepted.[7] The English press were particularly negative, and prompted the couple's move to the US.[49] As late as December 1999, NME was calling her a "no-talent charlatan",[117] and in October 2013, the mother of tennis pro Andy Murray took over a Twitter handle entitled Destroying Yoko Ono on Twitter.[167]

Her name still connotes the figure of the evil female interloper to the mainstream. Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain's widow, has endlessly been compared to Ono for her supposed bothersome role in Nirvana's businesses and as a scapegoat for Cobain's suicide.[168]

In 2007, when American singer Jessica Simpson was dating Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, the Simpson-Romo relationship was blamed for Romo's poor performances. In response, some Cowboys' fans gave her the moniker "Yoko Romo".[169]

In March 2015, Perrie Edwards, member of English girl group Little Mix, was compared to Yoko Ono and criticised for being the supposed reason for Zayn Malik's departure from the British boy band One Direction, creating tension within the group and causing widespread controversy.[170]

During the Liverpool Biennial in 2004, Ono flooded the city with two images on banners, bags, stickers, postcards, flyers, posters and badges: one of a woman's naked breast, the other of the same model's vulva. (During her stay in Lennon's city of birth, she said she was "astounded" by the city's renaissance.)[172] The piece, titled My Mummy Was Beautiful, was dedicated to Lennon's mother, Julia, who had died when he was a teenager.[173] According to Ono, the work was meant to be innocent, not shocking; she was attempting to replicate the experience of a baby looking up at its mother's body, those parts of the mother's body being a child's introduction to humanity.[174]

On December 13, 2006, one of Ono's bodyguards was arrested after he was allegedly taped trying to extort $2 million from her, threatening to release private conversations and photographs.[179] His bail was revoked, and he pleaded not guilty to two counts of attempted grand larceny.[180] In February 16, 2007 a deal was reached where extortion charges were dropped, and he pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny in the third degree, a felony, and sentenced to the 60 days he had already spent in jail. After reading an unapologetic statement, he was released to immigration officials because he had also been found guilty of overstaying his business visa.[181]

On June 26, 2007, Ono appeared on Larry King Live along with McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Olivia Harrison.[182] She headlined the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago on July 14, 2007, performing a full set that mixed music and performance art. She sang "Mulberry," a song about her time in the countryside after the Japanese collapse in World War II for only the third time ever, with Thurston Moore: She had previously performed the song with John and with Sean. On October 9 of that year, the Imagine Peace Tower on Viðey Island in Iceland, dedicated to peace and to Lennon, was turned on with her, Sean, Ringo, George Harrison's widow Olivia in attendance.[183]

Ono returned to Liverpool for the 2008 Liverpool Biennial, where she unveiled Sky Ladders in the ruins of Church of St Luke (which was largely destroyed during World War II and now stands roofless as a memorial to those killed in the Liverpool Blitz).[184] Two years later, on March 31, 2009, she went to the inauguration of the exhibition "Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko" to mark the 40th anniversary of the Lennon-Ono Bed-In at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Canada, from May 26 to June 2, 1969. (The hotel has been doing steady business with the room they stayed in for over 40 years.)[185] That year she became a grandmother, when Emi was born to Kyoko.[186]

In May 2009, she designed a T-shirt for the second Fashion Against AIDS campaign and collection of HIV/AIDS awareness, NGO Designers Against AIDS, and H&M, with the statement "Imagine Peace" depicted in 21 languages.[187] Ono appeared onstage at Microsoft's June 1, 2009, E3 Expo press conference with Olivia Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr to promote the Beatles: Rock Band video game,[188] which was universally praised by critics.[189][190] Ono appeared on the Basement Jaxx album Scars, featuring on the single "Day of the Sunflowers (We March On)".[191]

On February 16, 2010, Ono revived an early Plastic Ono Band lineup with Eric Clapton, and special guests including Paul Simon and Bette Midler.[192] On April 1 of that year, she was named the first "Global Autism Ambassador" by the Autism Speaks organization. She had created an artwork the year before for autism awareness and allowed it to be auctioned off in 67 parts to benefit the organization.[193] Ono appeared with Ringo Starr on July 7 at New York's Radio City Music Hall in celebration of Starr's 70th birthday, performing "With a Little Help from My Friends" and "Give Peace a Chance".[194] On September 16, she and Sean attended the opening of Julian Lennon's photo exhibition at the Morrison Hotel in New York City,[195] appearing for the first time photos with Cynthia and Julian.[53] She also promoted his work on her website.[196] On October 2, Ono and the Plastic Ono Band performed at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, with special guest Lady Gaga, whom she deeply admires.[197]

On February 18, 2011, her 78th birthday, Ono took out a full page advert in the UK free newspaper Metro for "Imagine Peace 2011". It took the form of an open letter, inviting people to think of, and wish for, peace.[198] With son Sean, she held a benefit concert to aid in the relief efforts for earthquake and tsunami-ravaged Japan on March 27 in New York City.[199] The effort raised a total of $33,000.[199] In July 2011, she visited Japan to support earthquake and tsunami victims and tourism to the country. During her visit, Ono gave a lecture and performance entitled "The Road of Hope" at Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, during which she painted a large calligraphy piece entitled "Dream" to help raise funds for construction of the Rainbow House, an institution for the orphans of the Great East Japan earthquake.[200] She also collected the 8th Hiroshima Art Prize for her contributions to art and for peace, that she was awarded the year prior.[201]

On June 29, 2012, Ono received a lifetime achievement award at the Dublin Biennial. During this (her second) trip to Ireland (the first was with John before they married), she visited the crypt of Irish leader Daniel O'Connell at Glasnevin Cemetery and Dún Laoghaire, from where Irish departed for England to escape the famine.[84] In February 2013, Ono accepted the Rainer Hildebrandt Medal at Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie Museum, awarded to her and Lennon for their lifetime of work for peace and human rights.[205] The next month, she tweeted an anti-gun message with the Season of Glass image of Lennon's bloodied glasses on what would have been her and Lennon's 44th anniversary, noting that more than 1 million people have been killed by guns since Lennon's death in 1980.[206] She was also given a Congressional citation from the Philippines for her monetary aid to the victims of typhoon Pablo.[207] She also donated to disaster relief efforts after typhoon Ondoy in 2009, and she assists Filipino schoolchildren.[208]

In June 2013, she curated the Meltdown festival in London, where she played two concerts, one with the Plastic Ono Band,[209] and the second on backing vocals during Siouxsie Sioux's rendition of "Walking on Thin Ice" at the Double Fantasy show.[210] In July, OR Books published Ono's sequel to 1964's Grapefruit, another book of instruction-based 'action poems' this time entitled, Acorn. She was made an honorary citizen of Reykjavík, Iceland, on October 9, 2013.[211] That same year, she became an honorary patron to Alder Hey Charity.[212]

On February 26, 2016, Ono was hospitalized after suffering what was rumored to be a possible stroke. It was later announced that she was experiencing extreme symptoms of influenza.[213]

On September 6, 2016, Secretly Canadian announced that they would be re-issuing 11 of Yoko Ono's albums from 1968 to 1985; Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins through Starpeace.[214][215]

Ono has been an activist for peace and human rights since the 1960s. After their wedding, she and Lennon held a "Bed-In for Peace" in their honeymoon suite at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel in March 1969,[21] where the pair of newlyweds in pajamas invited visitors and members of the press, eager to talk about and promote world peace. Another Bed-In two months later at the Queen Elizabeth Fairmont in Montreal resulted in the recording of their first single, "Give Peace A Chance",[29] a top-20 hit for the newly christened Plastic Ono Band.[216] Other performance/demonstrations with John included "bagism," iterations with John of the Bag Pieces she introduced in the early 1960s,[217] which encouraged a disregard for physical appearance in judging others.[3] In December 1969, the two continued spread their message of peace with billboards in 12 major world cities reading "WAR IS OVER! If You Want It - Happy Christmas from John & Yoko."[218]

In 1999, after the Columbine High School massacre, Ono paid for billboards to be put up in New York City and Los Angeles that bore the image of Lennon's blood-splashed spectacles.[20] Early in 2002[227] she paid about £150,000 ($213,375)[228] for a billboard in Piccadilly Circus with a line from Lennon's "Imagine": "Imagine all the people living life in peace."[20] Later the same year, she inaugurated a peace award, the LennonOno Grant for Peace, by giving $50,000 (£31,900) in prize money originally to artists living "in regions of conflict". The award is given out every two years in conjunction with the lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower, and was first given to Israeli and Palestinian artists. Its program has since expanded to include writers, such as Michael Pollan and Alice Walker, activists such as Vandana Shiva and Pussy riot, organizations such as New York's Center for Constitutional Rights, even an entire country (Iceland).[229]

On Valentine's Day 2003, on the eve of the Iraqi invasion by the US and UK, Ono heard about a couple, Andrew and Christine Gale, who were holding a love-in protest in their tiny bedroom in Addingham, West Yorkshire. She phoned them and said, "It's good to speak to you. We're supporting you. We're all sisters together."[230] The couple said that songs like "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine" inspired their protest. In 2004, Ono remade her song "Everyman..... Everywoman....." to support same-sex marriage, releasing remixes that included "Every Man Has a Man Who Loves Him" and "Every Woman Has a Woman Who Loves Her".[231]

In August 2011, she made the documentary film about the Bed-Ins Bed Peace available for free on YouTube,[232] and as part of her website "Imagine Peace".[233] In January 2013, the 79-year-old Ono, along with Sean Lennon and Susan Sarandon, took to rural Pennsylvania in a bus under the banner of the Artists Against Fracking group she and Sean created with Mark Ruffalo in August 2012 to protest against hydraulic fracturing.[234] Other group members include Lady Gaga and Alec Baldwin.[235]

Ono promotes her art, and shares inspirational messages and images,[236] through a robust and active Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook presence. In April 2014 her Twitter followers reached 4.69 million,[237] while her Instagram followers exceeded 99,000. Her tweets are short instructional poems,[238] comments on media and politics,[239] and notes about performances.[167]

According to journalist Barry Miles, after Lennon and Ono had been injured in a car accident in June 1969, partway through recording Abbey Road, a bed was installed in the studio with a microphone so the latter could make artistic comments about the album.[240] Miles thought Ono's continual presence in the studio during the latter part of the Beatles' career put strain on Lennon's relationship with the other band members. George Harrison verbally assaulted her after she took one of his chocolate digestive biscuits without asking.[241] The English press dubbed her "the woman who broke up the Beatles",[165] but Ono has stated that the Beatles broke up themselves without any direct involvement from her, adding "I don't think I could have tried even to break them up."[242] In an interview with Dick Cavett, Lennon explicitly denied that Ono broke up The Beatles[243] and even Harrison said in an interview with Cavett that the Beatles had problems long before Ono came on the scene.[244]

While the Beatles were together, every song written by Lennon or McCartney was credited as Lennon–McCartney regardless of whether the song was a collaboration or written solely by one of the two (except for those appearing on their first album, Please Please Me, which originally credited the songs to McCartney–Lennon). In 1976, McCartney released a live album called Wings over America, which credited the five Beatles tracks as P. McCartney–J. Lennon compositions, but neither Lennon nor Ono objected. After Lennon's death, however, McCartney again attempted to change the order to McCartney–Lennon for songs that were solely or predominantly written by him, such as "Yesterday,"[245] but Ono would not allow it, saying she felt this broke an agreement that the two had made while Lennon was still alive, and the surviving Beatle argued that such an agreement never existed. A spokesman for Ono said McCartney was making "an attempt to rewrite history".[246]

In a Rolling Stone interview in 1987, Ono pointed out McCartney's place in the process of the disintegration of the band.[247] On the 1998 John Lennon anthology, Lennon Legend, the composer credit of "Give Peace a Chance" was changed to "John Lennon" from its original composing credit of "Lennon–McCartney." Although the song was written by Lennon during his tenure with the Beatles, it was both written and recorded without the help of the band, and released as Lennon's first independent single under the "Plastic Ono Band" moniker. Lennon subsequently expressed regret that he had not given co-writing credit to Ono instead, who actually helped him write the song.[29] In 2002, McCartney released another live album, Back in the U.S. Live 2002, and the 19 Beatles songs included are described as "composed by Paul McCartney and John Lennon", which reignited the debate over credits with Ono. Her spokesperson Elliott Mintz called it "an attempt to rewrite history.", but nevertheless, Ono did not sue.[246]

In 1995, after the Beatles released Lennon's "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love", with demos provided by Ono, McCartney and his family collaborated with her and Sean to create the song "Hiroshima Sky is Always Blue", which commemorates the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of that Japanese city. Of Ono, McCartney stated: "I thought she was a cold woman. I think that's wrong..... she's just the opposite..... I think she's just more determined than most people to be herself." Two years later, however, Ono publicly compared Lennon to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, while McCartney, she said, more closely resembled his less-talented rival Antonio Salieri.[248] This remark infuriated McCartney's wife Linda, who was dying from breast cancer at the time, and when Linda died less than a year later, McCartney did not invite Ono to his wife's memorial service in Manhattan.[20]

Accepting an award at the 2005 Q Awards, Ono mentioned that Lennon had once felt insecure about his songwriting. She had responded, "You're a good songwriter. It's not June with spoon that you write. You're a good singer, and most musicians are probably a little bit nervous about covering your songs."[249]

In an October 2010 interview, Ono spoke about Lennon's "lost weekend" and her subsequent reconciliation with him. She credited McCartney with helping save her marriage to John. "I want the world to know that it was a very touching thing that [Paul] did for John."[250] While visiting with Ono in March 1974, McCartney, on leaving, asked "[W]hat will make you come back to John?" McCartney subsequently passed her response to Lennon while visiting him in Los Angeles. "John often said he didn't understand why Paul did this for us, but he did." In 2012, McCartney revealed that he did not blame Ono for the breakup of the Beatles and credited Ono with inspiring much of Lennon's post-Beatles work.[251]

Ono had a difficult relationship with her stepson, Lennon's son Julian, which has improved over the years. He has expressed disappointment at her handling of Lennon's estate, and at the difference between his upbringing and Sean's, adding, "when Dad gave up music for a couple of years to be with Sean, why couldn't he do that with me?"[252] More egregiously, however, Julian was left out of his father's will, and he battled Ono in court for years, settling in 1996 for an unspecified amount which the papers reported was "believed to" be in the area of £20 million, which Julian has denied.[20]

He has admitted that he is his "mother's boy", which Ono has cited as the reason why she was never able to get close to him: "Julian and I tried to be friends. Of course, if he's too friendly with me, then I think that it hurts his other relatives. He was very loyal to his mother. That was the first thing that was in his mind."[53] Nevertheless, she and Sean attended the opening of Julian's photo exhibition at the Morrison Hotel in New York City in 2010,[195] appearing for the first time for photos with Cynthia and Julian.[53] She also promoted the exhibition on her website, and Julian and Sean are close.[196]

Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies' debut single was "Be My Yoko Ono," first released in 1990 and later appearing on their 1992 album Gordon.[253] The lyrics are "a shy entreaty to a potential girlfriend, caged in terms that self-deflatingly compare himself to one of pop music's foremost geniuses." It also has a "sarcastic imitation of Yoko Ono's unique vocal style in the bridge".[254]

In 2000, American folk singer Dar Williams recorded a song titled "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono."[255] Bryan Wawzenek of the website Ultimate Classic Rock described the song as "us[ing] John and Yoko as a starting point for exploring love, and particularly, love between artists."[256]

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